Disordered Desires: All are Guilty, All are Loved.… ·...

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Transcript August 1/2, 2015

Disordered Desires: All are Guilty, All are Loved Aaron Brockett | Romans 1:18-2:4

Well, good morning! How are you? It is so good to see you guys. Thank you very much. If you are visiting, that is not typically what happens. I have been gone a while. So if you don’t know me or remember me, my name is Aaron and I get to be one of the pastors around here. Every seven years our elders grant our pastors an extended time away for renewal and refreshment. We call that a sabbatical. A sabbatical is not just a vacation. It’s certainly longer than a typical vacation, but it’s certainly more structured than one. It’s not just a bunch of down time away, although we did have some downtime, but it’s an opportunity for me to kind of get out of the routine of what I do on a weekly basis and to re-‐examine my heart before the Lord, to recognize I’m a child of God, not just by what I do for Him, but because of who I am. So I just was able to get away and spend some time with the Lord. God really did some really good, healthy things in my heart when I was away that I’d like to share with you this fall. And then our family, we have four kids under the age of 12, got to spend a lot, a lot, a lot of time together. Like we were in the Suburban and I think we drove 6,000 miles total this summer out to the west coast. We hit the Grand Canyon. We hit San Diego and all the way up the coastline, Lake Tahoe. I was looking for a picture that could capture our time together this summer most adequately. I think it has to be this one. This is my three-‐year-‐old daughter. She was very excited to eat some ice cream in San Francisco. That captures her personality beautifully. So, she kept us laughing over the summer. I just need to say this to you: Thank you. Thank you. That was a gift you gave to us. It’s not an expectation for me, it’s a gift that you’ve given to us as a church and I’d like to thank you. Not every pastor gets that time away. I’m really grateful. Can we just express our appreciation to Jake, Matt, and Petie; the guys who taught this summer? They did an awesome job. Wherever we’d happen to be in the country, I’d tune in live, and man, they just really taught me and God did some stuff through their sermons on the life of David that was just so impactful. They’re such gifted communicators. And I’ve had so many of you come up to me in the last week or two, since we’ve been back, and say, “Man, those guys just did an amazing job. We have so many gifted preachers on our staff.” And we do. The really cool thing is we have more than just those three. There is actually a bunch that you haven’t necessarily heard yet. They’re in the bullpen, so to speak, warming up. Some of these guys are starting to throw some serious heat. I need to up my game. I can’t wait to introduce you to them in the coming months and weeks because this church is a preacher factory. We do that very intentionally. You can clap for that. A church should never be tied to one personality or preaching style. That’s unhealthy. We want to develop preachers, not only just for this ministry, but also I have a heart to develop them so that maybe

Disordered Desires: All are Guilty, All are Loved August 1/2, 2015

Intellectual materials are the property of Traders Point Christian Church. All rights reserved. 2

one day God will use them to plant churches or to lead churches. We want to be a sending church in that capacity. Thank you for the way you foster and encourage that gift in me and in those guys. It’s just awesome. If you have a Bible will you go ahead and grab it and get to Romans 1? That’s where we’re going to be today. Some of you can probably relate to this: I am married to a woman who loves to cook healthy. She has been that way for as long as I can remember. Here in recent years she’s really ratcheted that up a bit because we have four kids and she wants to feed them healthy things. So she’s introduced our family to chia seeds, and almond milk, and coconut flour. I’m not complaining. I complained a little at first. Very often she’ll come up to me in the kitchen and she’ll say, “Here, try this. This tastes just like the real thing, but healthier.” How many of you have had that conversation in your household? I’d say 99.9 percent of the time she is right. I’ll take it and I’ll go, “Wow, that actually does taste good. That’s healthy for me?” And she’ll say, “Yeah.” But there are a handful of times when—not so much. As an example, this summer she attempted to make healthy chocolate cupcakes. Bless her heart. It’s just not going to happen. I think there is an unwritten law that says, “Cupcakes are to be delightfully unhealthy.” But she attempted to make that. It didn’t happen so much. They looked like cupcakes. They smelled like cupcakes. They felt like cupcakes. They did not taste like cupcakes. And she admitted that. I want you to know, especially if this is the first time that we’ve met, I did not just throw my wife under the bus. I want you to know that I get her permission to use her in every sermon I ever use her in. She has complete veto power. I say, “Honey, I want to use you as an illustration.” I’ll tell her what it is and she’ll say, “I’m not comfortable with that,” and I’ll pull it. So a couple of weeks ago I said, “Honey, I want to use that as an illustration when I come back.” She said, “Well, tell me what you are going to say,” and I told her. And she said, “Okay, I’ll give you permission,” and then she proceeded to point out the fatal flaw in what I just told you. And some of you have already picked up on it. I can see your heads nodding. She said, “You’re going to tell the church that I hand you something and say, ‘Here, taste this. This tastes just like the real thing but it’s healthier?’”And I said, “Yeah.” She said, “You do realize that the healthy thing is the real thing and the unhealthy thing is the fake thing.” I hate it when she does that. It kind of ruined the illustration. Here’s the thing, and some of you can relate to this. I’m a child of the 80s, which means I grew up thinking Oreos, Doritos, and Barbeque Hot Pockets, in all of their goody yummyness—I thought that was real food. So, because of that, I grew up having a taste for the fake and I didn’t have a taste for the real; that which is actually healthy for you. So when I was in preschool and it was snack time, they would serve celery with peanut butter. And how many of you are with me? I’d lick the peanut butter off and throw the celery stick away. The celery stick was just the dispenser for the peanut butter. So, historically, I’ve always reached for the Oreos and I’ve passed up the asparagus because I didn’t have a taste for asparagus. But, as it turns out, asparagus is way more real than an Oreo.



So I’ve had to reorder some of these tastes that have been disordered in my life. It’s been a bit disorienting. I have to tell you that the older I get, and the more things I try, the more my tastes are being reordered. This, in a nutshell, is the human condition. It’s what Genesis 1-‐3 is all about. In Genesis 1 it says that we have Creator God Who created this world and everything in it and He stepped back and He said, “This is good.” Then He created Adam and He said, “The only thing that isn’t good is that he is alone,” so He created Adam a partner in Eve who is equal to him and like him, but distinct from him. They complimented one another. God put them together in the covenant of marriage and He said, “I want you to come together and, I want to enjoy each other in every way, and I want you to be one flesh, and I want you to reproduce.” This isn’t just God saying, “I want you to have a big family,” this is God saying, “I want you to reproduce other image bearers of who I am.” And God looked at that and said, “This is for your joy, and this is for your fulfillment, and this will bring ultimate satisfaction to you and bring glory to Me.” And yet Satan, the original fraud, showed up and he essentially got Adam and Eve to question if what God says is real. And if he can get you to doubt that what God says is real, then he can get you to question it and to ultimately revise it. It can be summed up in this simple, yet devastating question that he still hammers us with today, “Did God really say…?” In other words, can you trust that what He says is ultimately for your good? That’s what God said then, but maybe He’s changed it now. In essence, what Genesis 3 teaches us is that Adam and Eve, our original mom and dad, they chucked the asparagus and gave us a taste for the Oreo. That we fell for the substitute and we gave up what is truly real. And this is the human struggle. All throughout Scripture—Scripture repeatedly warns us to stay away from that which is false. In fact, Paul writes to the Galatian church in Galatians 1:6. He says, “I am astonished that you are so quickly deserting Him who called you in the grace of Christ and are turning to a different gospel.” And the word gospel just means news, where we might say good news. He quickly qualifies that by saying, “Not that there is another one, but there are some who trouble you and want to distort the gospel of Christ.” He would say in 2 Timothy 4, “For the time is coming when people will not endure sound teaching but, having itching ears, they will accumulate for themselves teachers to suit their own passions and will turn away from listening to the truth and wander off into myth.” So this weekend and next weekend we are just in a really quick two-‐part series before we begin our fall series through the book of Acts. And we are calling these two weekends, this series, Disordered Desires. Here’s what I want to do. Here’s where we are going. Today, I basically want to address this question: What is a Christian? At its essence, what does that mean? I am not asking, “What do Christians believe?” And I’m not asking, “How do you become a Christian?” I’m asking, “What is a Christian?” This gets back to the real and the pseudo-‐real, and trusting God or questioning God, and all of that. Once we kind of bear down on that answer, then next weekend I want to basically say, “Now in light of that answer, what kind of church must we be given the cultural climate that we currently find ourselves in?” There’s a great amount of confusion, there’s a great amount of hostility going on right now. Now that we know what the gospel is and what a Christian is, how do we now practically live that out: Grace and truth?



I can’t think of a better book to get guidance and direction from than the book of Romans. I love the book of Romans. I’ve shared my testimony with you before, if you’ve been around here for a while. I grew up kind of a church brat. I was born two days before Easter and my mom dressed me up in blue and took me to church on Easter Sunday. I’ve been in church ever since. Because of that, I kind of grew up thinking because I was a good kid, because I grew up in a Christian home, that I was sort of good with God. And it wasn’t until I was 17 years old that I was sitting on a picnic bench outside of the school that I attended and, for whatever reason, I started reading the book of Romans on my own. It wasn’t so much a youth pastor who led me to the Lord, or a church camp, or a specific sermon, although those things had their role. It was primarily the book of Romans that led me to Jesus Christ. By the time I got done reading Romans 5, I recognized my sin and that I needed a Savior and I gave my life to Jesus Christ. If you’ve never read the book of Romans, I encourage you to, because it has impacted thousands of lives throughout history. Paul writes this letter to the church in Rome. And Rome had a very similar culture to what we see developing in America today. Rome was sort of the imperial seat of the government. It was sort of like the Washington D.C. of their day. And the early church was facing assaults from two fronts: Paganism from the outside, which could basically be a culture that questions, or doubts, or rejects what God calls real. That’s a pretty good definition of paganism. Or, false teaching from the inside, which is the exact same thing. False teaching that questions or doubts what God calls real. Can I just say this? False teaching from within has always been much more destructive to the church than paganism from without. It’s not paganism that will bring the church down. It’s false teaching from within. That’s why Paul writes this letter to the church in Rome. He writes this letter so that the Christians will be built up in their faith. What that means is that they wouldn’t just know in whom they believed, they would know what they believed. And that they would have a strong foundation to stand upon that would give them poise to love their neighbor, even if their neighbor spit in their face. That would give them this confidence to say, “My confidence is in the Lord, not so much in what the culture says about me.” Not to lash out or to throw a rock, but to be gracious in the face of that and to live out grace and truth. I would say it this way, “To have a root system that can stand the storms that would come our way.” We got a lot of rain this summer, did we not? I wasn’t here, so I wouldn’t know. So don’t hate me. But I was watching. We got a lot of rain and it really soaked the soil. About three weeks ago I flew in to do a wedding so I was home for a couple of days. The day that I flew out this massive storm came through. Maybe you remember it. It was really brief but the wind came through and it knocked down several trees, trees that otherwise would have been standing. The reason why was, the soil was saturated and it weakened the root system. The same thing is happening to the church today. You turn on the news, you get on social media, and you are just saturated with this narrative that we see going on in culture. Now, when the winds begin to blow if you don’t have a solid foundation you’ll easily be toppled by that. That’s why Paul writes the book of Romans. He is basically saying, “I want you to be a gospel community on mission. I want you to know, not just in whom you believe, but what you believe. Not so you can have this judgmental head



knowledge to throw rocks at other people, but so you can graciously engage them with the truth. You can graciously engage others with what God calls real.” And so Paul, who was a citizen of Rome (he was born a Jew and he was trained as a Pharisee) did not grow up necessarily religious or certainly Christian. He had a dramatic conversion account as an adult. Here is what I love about Paul. Paul knows the opposing viewpoint better than opposers themselves understand their own viewpoints. So Paul writes the book of Romans as a way to lovingly engage. The first 11 chapters are pretty much doctrine, which might explain why maybe you’ve tried to read the book of Romans and you just couldn’t get through it. Because it’s a lot of substance, it’s a lot of meat. Here is what I’d say. Hang with it because by the time you get to chapter 12, it’s all practical application—12 through 16 is all practical application. The first 11 chapters are the foundation. Paul writes as a concerned pastor. He’s not yet been to Rome. He’s going to write this letter to the church and then he is going to go and be with them. Paul, basically, is going to confront them and say some things that are tough to hear. But please understand this. It is for the purpose of human flourishing. It is for their joy and fulfillment. In short, the passage we are going to read today is Paul saying to you and to me, “Oreos aren’t real food.” And for some of us, who maybe have never heard that before, it’s going to sound disorienting and maybe even offensive. But please understand it is for the purpose of human flourishing. You can either recognize that you have been created in God’s image or you can recreate God in your own image. These are the only two options that we have. So I’m going to read Romans 1:18 through 2:4. Here is what I am going to do. It is a relatively lengthy passage so I’m going to ask you to hang with me. It will be on the screens behind me. I’m not going to make any commentary. I’m just going to read it because I want us to hear from God’s Word directly. I don’t want you to confuse my words with God’s. Then afterward I’ll try to offer some explanation and we’ll apply it. Can I just give you a heads up? By the time I am done reading this passage, every single person in the room should feel a little uncomfortable and even offended. If you’re not, you’re probably not listening or you’re thinking about your neighbor whom you can’t wait to have listen to the sermon. Please don’t do that. This passage is meant for you. Can I just say this as your pastor? It’s primarily meant for me. So let’s read it with great humility. These are God’s words. “For the wrath of God is revealed from heaven against all ungodliness and unrighteousness of men, who by their unrighteousness suppress the truth. For what can be known about God is plain to them, because God has shown it to them. For His invisible attributes, namely, His eternal power and divine nature, have been clearly perceived, ever since the creation of the world, in all things that have been made. So they are without excuse. For although they knew God, they did not honor Him as God or give thanks to Him, but they became futile in their thinking, and their foolish hearts were darkened. Claiming to be wise, they became fools, and exchanged the glory of the immortal God for images resembling mortal man and birds and animals and creeping things.



“Therefore God gave them up in the lusts of their hearts to impurity, to the dishonoring of their bodies among themselves, because they exchanged the truth about God for a lie and worshiped and served the creature rather than the Creator, Who is blessed forever! Amen. “For this reason God gave them up to dishonorable passions. For their women exchanged natural relations for those that are contrary to nature, and the men likewise gave up natural relations with women and were consumed with passion for one another, men committing shameless acts with men and receiving in themselves the due penalty for their error. “And since they did not see fit to acknowledge God, God gave them up to a debased mind to do what ought not to be done. They were filled with all manner of unrighteousness, evil, covetousness, malice. They are full of envy, murder, strife, deceit, maliciousness. They are gossips, slanderers, haters of God, insolent, haughty, boastful, inventors of evil, disobedient to parents, foolish, faithless, heartless, ruthless. Though they know God’s decree that those who practice such things deserve to die, they not only do them but give approval to those who practice them. “Therefore, you have no excuse, O man, every one of you who judges. For in passing judgment on another you condemn yourself, because you, the judge, practice the very same things. We know that the judgment of God rightly falls on those who practice such things. Do you suppose, O man—you who judge those who practice such things and yet do them yourself—that you will escape the judgment of God? Or do you presume on the riches of His kindness and forbearance and patience, not knowing that God’s kindness is meant to lead you to repentance?” This is God’s Word. I want to begin with this question that I’ve had to wrestle with in my past. It’s simply this, as I began to read that text the third word that I read was wrath. It’s not necessarily my favorite word in the English language and it’s actually confused me at times in my past. Maybe you’ve wrestled with this, maybe you are wrestling with this right now. It is: How could God be a loving God and how could He be a God who has wrath? Have any of you wondered about that question? It seems like these two things are irreconcilable, that you can’t have both. Here’s what I want you to know. The wrath of God reveals that He is not indifferent. That’s what Paul is saying to us as he is saying, “Listen, the stakes are really high.” And that word wrath is actually this idea of an extreme emotional connection that He desires to have for you. Can I just ask this question here this morning? This is full on participation here. How many of you, just by the showing of hands, would say, “I am a loving person,” or you try to be a loving person? Just raise your hand if you would. Now if you hand’s not raised, there’s a concern there. I don’t know why you wouldn’t want to be known as a loving person, “I’m not a loving person.” Every hand should go up. We all desire to be a loving person. We think that we are a loving person. Now how many of you have ever just lost your cool? Totally lost it, you might even say you were wrathful; road rage, imaginary arguments with someone (which you always win). Those are my favorite kind. I’m brilliant in an imaginary argument. So, just about every hand in the room went up to say you were a loving person, yet, at the same time, we would all say, “There are some moments where I’ve really lost my cool.” There are certainly moments in my life that I certainly wouldn’t want replayed on this screen for you to all see, times when I’ve totally lost my cool and been irrationally angry.



So what are we to do with that? How do we reconcile those two? Well, for starters, part of that is the tension of being a human being. That we would all say we have the best intentions. We want to be a loving person, yet there are times, there are things, there are injustices in this world that should cause us to be quite angry. In fact they must. The big, big difference we have to get our heads around is God does not have sin. God is perfect in His being. So when God is angry, it’s a righteous kind of anger. That might help some of us. For some of you, you may not be fully convinced yet. But we need to understand the fact that His wrath is anger over you and for you because you’ve exchanged the asparagus for Oreos. It’s this idea that we have exchanged the real for the pseudo-‐real. So, for example, if a predator lured my three-‐year-‐old daughter away with promises of candy and then abducted her and did unspeakable things to her, the appropriate response for me is not just indifference, or to say, “That really bothers me.” The appropriate response would be wrath. If a drug dealer came and dealt drugs to my soon-‐to-‐be 13-‐year-‐old son and he got addicted to them and he decided to make the choice to stay addicted to them and it spun his adolescent life out of control, the appropriate response for me wouldn’t be a mild irritation. The appropriate response would be wrath, not only at the drug dealer, but even with my son whom I love and I would die for. Why? Because he’s made a really foolish decision. You see, sin is the predator. Sin is the drug dealer. And you and I, the human condition is that we have exchanged that which is truly real, that which is meant for human flourishing, and joy, and fulfillment for the pseudo-‐real. And the opposite of love is not anger. The opposite of love is indifference. C.S. Lewis put it so well. He said, “If God is love, He is by definition something more than mere kindness.” Verse 18 goes on and it says, “In our unrighteousness we suppress the truth.” “How do we suppress the truth, Paul?” Here is the answer. We suppress the truth when our desires and our affections become disordered and then we choose to submit to them rather than what God says about them. Verses 19 through 23 are really the heart of the passage. Paul is basically saying, “When you walk outside today after this service is over and you kind of look around at nature and you look around at the universe,” he is basically saying, “all of that is this profound announcement that there is a God Who is running this and we can either acknowledge that awesome fact in humble gratitude or we can suppress that truth because we don’t like the idea of being under God’s authority.” So we suppress the truth when we hear or inherently know something about God but we don’t like it. Therefore we look for ways to deny it, to rebel against it, or to revise it. And that is the definition of sin and that is the primary thing this passage is saying. You see, all of us are predisposed to worship our hearts, our idol factories. And worship, especially if you are just coming to church and you would not consider yourself a Believer, worship is not just a set of songs that we sing on Sunday morning. Worship is something that we all do throughout our everyday life. Worship is whatever you lean into for your value, your fulfillment, and your identity.



Worship is what you do when you are tired and you are stressed and you are weary and you are nursing yourself back. What do you find yourself just naturally gravitating to or thinking about? You see, we can worship a career, we can worship relationships. When a man or a woman sits down and gazes at naked bodies on a computer screen, that’s more than just lust. That’s worship. That’s why it’s so addictive. It’s this idea that I am running to this to nurse my weariness, to nurse my stress. When we are searching for affirmation from others it’s more than just a low self-‐esteem. That, in a nutshell, is worship. When a child is so wrapped up in a toy or a video game that he cannot hear the voice of his parents—I can’t even imagine that happening, but I’m sure it happens somewhere—when that happens, he is essentially worshipping. We are built to worship. All of us do it. It’s whatever you find your identity in. And Paul says, “The heart is an idol factory.” Now just in case you think that Paul is saying, “I have all this figured out and now you guys need to figure this out,” you have to read the rest of the book of Romans because Paul throws himself right in there with us. In fact, if you keep reading in Romans 7:15, Paul says these words that I deeply resonate with. He says, “For I do not understand my own actions. For I do not do what I want, but I do the very thing I hate… What a wretched man I am.” Can any of you relate to that at all? There are times when I am just like, “Why am I doing this? I thought that I would be past this by now.” And basically, what he is saying here is, “I am right there with you. I have failed and I succumb to disordered desires and affections as well.” We’re all in the same boat. Every single person in this room is guilty of disordered desires and affections. Need you think that this passage is about one particular person or group of people read 19 through 23 again because Paul goes through there and he talks about envy, and he talks about maliciousness, which is to have ill intent towards someone else, and he talks about strife. That’s bitter conflict with others. He talks about slander. That’s defaming others or giving false reports about others. He talks about being insolent. That’s to be rude or to have a lack of respect. He talks about gossipers. That’s basically saying something about someone behind their back that you wouldn’t say to their face. We’ve all been guilty of that. He talks about murder. He talks about disobedience to parents. I remember the first time I read that. I’m sitting there reading through this list. I don’t know about you, I’m not thinking about myself. I’m reading through this going, “Oh yeah, sexual sin, evil, murder, gossip (I’m just concerned. It’s not gossip, it’s just a prayer request), evil, and malice.” And I read on, “…disobedience to parents. It’s like one of these things does not belong with the others, Paul.” He just ran a sting operation and got all of us. Here’s the deal, man. If you read Romans 1 with any sort of arrogance, if you read Romans 1, in fact, as I read a few minutes earlier, and think, “Man Aaron I’m so glad you are back from sabbatical. Yeah, read Romans 1, I have a co-‐worker, I have a neighbor, I have an ex-‐husband, or I have a child who really needs to hear this passage,” look up because there is a 2x4 coming right for your eyes. That’s largely what the world rejects. He hits that on down. He is basically saying, “You who are going to take what I’ve just said and judge others with it, don’t you realize you are guilty of the same thing?” “Guilty of what, Paul? I’m not guilty of that sexual sin.” “Yeah but you are guilty of gossip and disobedience to parents.”



What is it in the human heart that would cause somebody to murder someone, which none of us would say that we would ever do. And disobedience to parents, do you know what it is? It’s the same disordered desire in the human heart that I’m going to pursue what I want. I’m going to pursue what I feel. I’m going to pursue what I think feels right and I don’t care what that authority figure says. That when I come into my child’s room and I say, “You need to clean your room,” and he doesn’t, it’s the same sin in the human heart that says, “I don’t trust that what you call real and what is for my joy, and fulfillment, and human flourishing really is so I’m going to choose my own way.” Now Romans 1 gets a lot of press and I’m sure you know why. Because Paul mentions same sex attraction and same sex behavior here. I want you to know that, while that is a sin, it is not a major league sin and then my greed, materialism, and pride is a minor league sin. You see this is what gets so confusing and when rocks start getting thrown. You have to read this passage number one: recognizing that Paul is saying this to our human hearts. This passage should bring us to our knees in humility, and repentance, and tears because we are all in the same boat; exchanging the truth of God for a lie. It isn’t that this would bring about condemnation upon others, but it is that we would begin to recognize that God has our best interests in mind. Are we going to believe Him or not? Listen, I have all kinds of desires and affections in my life that are disordered that I have to submit to the Lordship of Jesus Christ. I’ve been happily married for 16 years to a woman is who is drop dead gorgeous. I don’t deserve her and I’m half afraid every morning she is going to wake up and go, “What did I do?” I’m still thinking that might happen because I married way over my head. There is no way I could do any better than that. And yet there are days when I might notice the beauty of another woman and be tempted with a disordered desire. In that moment I have a choice to make. Will I act upon it because my flesh desires it or will I take that disordered desire and submit it to the Lordship of Christ? My wife, I’m sure after 16 years of marriage—I can’t imagine it happening very often but I’m sure that there has probably been another attractive man that she has noticed. It just kind of blows your minds, right? She has to do the same thing. We are all in the same boat with that. Now when it comes to Romans 1 I’ve had lots and lots of conversations with people who say, “Well, Paul couldn’t have possibly meant this,” or “that’s what it meant then and this is what it means now.” Basically, the word for that is “revise.” Let’s revise this passage to make it more palatable to our culture today and to my tastes and desires today. I just want you to be careful because if you have a God that never confronts you, and never disagrees with you, and never calls you on the carpet, you really don’t have a God at all. You have an errand boy. You’re basically asking God to just affirm the way that you feel. You’re basically just going back to that age old question, “Did God really say?” And we want to revise it and we want to rebel against it. You see Romans 3 goes on to say, “Listen, there is nobody that is righteous, not even one.” Then in Romans 6 it says to all of us that as long as we are in these physical bodies, all of these disordered desires that we have never really go away. But empowered by His grace, those desires will progressively lose their reign over our lives as we inch those things out and give Jesus full reign as Lord over our hearts.



Then we get to Romans 8 and it says that eventually grace will completely set us free. It’s the process of justification. We are justified by God’s righteous act when He sent Jesus on a cross for us, then sanctified, which is the process of daily giving my disordered desires to God and saying, “You are Lord and I am not,” and then ultimately glorified when we are set free by the grace of God. So what is a Christian? I’m not asking for the process, I’m not asking what a Christian believes. I’m asking: What is a Christian? A Christian is somebody who is saved by grace but then submits all of their disordered desires to the Lordship of Christ. I don’t doubt that we have these certain desires and impulses within our flesh. The question is: Do you trust what God says is real is real or are you chasing after a false substitute? Notice at the very end of the passage in Chapter 2:4 it says, “God’s kindness is meant to lead us to repentance.” You have to recognize that there may be… I would imagine there are a number of secret sins in this room right now, the dark corners of your heart that you’ve never pulled back the veil on. You’ve never let anybody else see. Maybe years ago, like when you first started engaging in that secret sin, you felt guilty about it, you repented of it, you wept over it. But maybe you never really ever got caught. Maybe there was no real consequence to it. So what happens is we have a tendency to normalize it and then we say, “Clearly I’m not hurting anybody. God’s not hitting me with lightning yet so I guess it’s okay.” Please don’t misunderstand. God is not blind to that. It’s His kindness, not wanting to ruin you, not wanting to crush you, but lead you and me to repentance. God is patient with us, patiently bringing us along so that we might submit more and more of our hearts to Jesus Christ. Being a Christian means understanding the nature of God as Creator and Sustainer of Life, the disorder of sin, and how Jesus Christ takes our unrighteousness, nails it to a cross, so that we could be covered in His righteousness before God. It isn’t anything you can achieve so you can’t be arrogant about it. And you certainly can’t throw rocks at other people. Galatians 2:20 puts it so well: “I have been crucified with Christ. It is no longer I who live, but Christ who lives in me. And the life I now live in the flesh I live by faith in the Son of God, who loved me and gave Himself for me.” Being a Christian is somebody who has a daily sparring match with his disordered desires and then submits to the Lordship of Christ in humility. You see, if the grace of God was represented by this chair, if this chair symbolically represented the gospel, the question that I want every person in this room to ask this morning is: What am I doing with it? It’s kind of like a chair. A chair can have a number of functions. We have a couple of chairs in our house that I have never sat in. They are just ornamental. They are just decorations. So you walk in and they are just kind of there. For some of us that’s what the grace of God is in our lives. It’s just a decoration. We grew up Christian, we believe in God. It’s just kind of there in case we need it. How many of you use a chair just to store or hang clothing? You never really sat in it, but you just kind of drape your jacket over it, “I’m going to iron that someday.” It’s just there. Some of us use the chair maybe to lean on every now and then. We don’t want to depend on it too much, but we’ll lean on it, maybe take a little breather when life gets tough, then we’re back in the old routine after that. Here’s what it looks like to fully receive the grace of God. It’s just this simple [Aaron sits in the chair]. My complete faith and trust is in this chair right now. I’m completely resting my entire being in this chair.



That’s what it looks like to respond to the grace of God. It’s to say, “God, it’s not anything that I can do. It’s totally you. I’m going to find my identity not in my desires, not in my reputation, but I’m going to find my identity in who Jesus Christ is. And I want more and more of Jesus to infiltrate my heart and less and less of these other things. You see, as a Believer, when you don’t rest on the chair of grace, what that ends up looking like is that you are a hypocrite. That’s what the culture rejects, and rightfully so. When we reject it, when we claim to be a Believer but we are not resting on God’s grace, we want to revise what God says, that’s another “H” word. It’s called being a heretic. But when we rest upon God’s grace, His graciousness to us, and then we represent that truth with a gracious spirit, it’s this posture of humility that’s infectious. It’s that our hearts break over the fact that we are all in the same boat, in the same condition. We’ve exchanged the real for the pseudo real. So, what are you doing with the chair of God’s grace? This summer I read a book by a lady by the name of Rosaria Butterfield. She was an English professor. She was tenured at Syracuse University. This was in the late 1990s. She was a feminist and she was a lesbian. Rosario was in a committed relationship with her partner and for all practical purposes she was very happy. She pitied and despised Christians. She pitied them because she thought they were ignorant. She despised them because she thought that they were bigots. She was writing a dissertation on the Evangelical right’s Promise Keepers, the men’s conference. Maybe some of you remember that in the 1990s. She wrote a scathing article criticizing it. She got a bunch of letters in the mail from Christians who were taking the chair and throwing it at her. Sometimes we can do that too. She just used that as further ammunition to say, “Yeah, you are proving my point. You’re ignorant and you are a bigot.” There is one letter she got in the mail though; it was from a pastor in town. He was very articulate. He was very kind in the letter, but he also challenged some of her presuppositions about the Bible and who Jesus was and what it meant to be a Christian. She wadded up his letter and threw it in the trash six times. She kept digging it out and re-‐reading it. It just kind of didn’t sit well with her. Finally, she said, “You know what? I probably need to talk to somebody from the other side,” and he would be a good one. So she contacted him and she said, “I’m writing this dissertation and I was wondering if I could get together and interview you?” He was like, “You know what? Why don’t you come over to our house? My wife would like to host you for dinner.” She had never been invited over to a pastor’s home before. She wasn’t quite sure what she felt about that. She didn’t want any of her colleagues or students to see her going into a pastor’s home, so she parked several blocks away and she wore her hoodie and she put on her sunglasses and all that. She went over to the pastor’s house and she said that they were so kind and gracious to her at the dinner table, and they developed this friendship. For two years they would meet often and talk and they would disagree very politely on things. He would engage her on different issues. She began to read the Bible, mostly because she was interested in the literature of it. She was an English professor and she honestly had never read it. She was like, “Well, if I’m going to do this dissertation I need to read it.” So she began to read the Bible and she began to meet with this pastor and his wife. So she was getting the truth but she was also seeing lived out truth through the grace of this pastor and his wife. Here’s what she would say in her book. “For two years that pastor and his wife brought the church to me,



because there was no way I was setting foot in one.” Rosario, over two years… If you are interested in reading her account it is all in her book Secrets of an Unlikely Convert. She eventually gave her life to Jesus Christ. She calls her conversion a train wreck because she wasn’t looking for it and it absolutely wrecked her life, career-‐wise. She broke up with her partner. Today she is married to a pastor. They’ve adopted four kids. She is a prolific writer. She is an author and a speaker. I want to read, as I close, an excerpt from her book. This is not specifically about same sex attraction, although she mentions it. I want you to hear this through the lens of the fact that she describes repentance and Lordship perhaps clearer than I’ve ever read it. So let me close with her words, “That night I prayed and asked God if the gospel message was for someone like me too. I viscerally felt the living presence of God as I prayed. Jesus seemed present and alive. I knew that I was not alone in my room. I prayed that if Jesus was truly a real and risen God that He would change my heart. And if He was real and I was His, I prayed that He would give me the strength of mind to follow Him and the character to become a godly woman. “I prayed for the strength of character to repent for a sin that at that time didn’t feel like a sin at all. It felt like life, plain and simple. I prayed that if my life were actually His life, that He would take it back and make it what He wanted it to be. I asked Him to take it all; my sexuality, my profession, my community, my tastes, my books, and my tomorrows. Two incommensurable worldviews clashed together: The reality of lived experience, and the truth of the Word of God. “In continental philosophy we talk about the difference between the true and the real. How did my life become real but not true? The Bible told me to repent, but I didn’t feel like repenting. Do you have to feel like repenting in order to repent? How do you repent for a sin that doesn’t feel like a sin? How could I be tenured in a field that is sin? How could I, and everyone I knew and loved, be in sin? “In this crucible of confusion, I learned the first rule of repentance; that repentance requires greater intimacy with God than with our sin. How much greater? About the size of a mustard seed. Repentance requires that we draw near to Jesus no matter what. And sometimes we all have to crawl there on our hands and knees. Repentance is an intimate affair and, for many of us, intimacy is a terrifying prospect. When Christ gave me the strength to follow Him, I didn’t stop feeling like a lesbian. I’ve learned that the Lord doesn’t chance my feelings until I obey Him.” Every single one of us is in the same boat. We have exchanged the truth of God for a lie. Here’s what I just want to ask you to deal with in your own heart today. Is God trying to reveal something to you and to me? Is He trying to show us that maybe there is something we need to repent of that doesn’t feel like sin? And we need to take Him and trust Him at His Word, that what He has designed and decreed is for our ultimate joy and fulfillment. Grace and truth sets us free and gives us new life; an identity that rests its complete weight upon the gospel of grace. Father we come to You right now and I thank You for the truth of this Word, even though it is hard to hear. I pray today, God, that it would act like smelling salts that would maybe awaken us to the reality of who You are, that You are a good God, You are gracious and truthful and we have all been hijacked by the deceit of an enemy who wants to serve us something that is not real, that we might give up that which is truly real.



God, give us grace and compassion as we try to live this out within a culture that is confused, and even hostile, to what God calls real. May our hearts break, Father. May we stay humble, recognizing that we need to continue to rest on who Jesus Christ is and who we are in Him. And we ask this right now in the power of Jesus Christ. Amen.

Disordered Desires: All are Guilty, All are Loved.… ·...

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